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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27852198">The Field</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/W_G/pseuds/WG'>WG (W_G)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:26:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,511</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27852198</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/W_G/pseuds/WG</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bill Haydon/Jim Prideaux</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>PART ONE</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In Sarratt’s back field an ember glows red in the dark.</p>
<p>For some reason a fragment of memory from his early Circus days comes to mind, a set of nesting dolls left on a second-floor back-room shelf. Matryoshka, cheap and garish, the kind one might pick up in an airport on the way home. Someone’s souvenir, maybe. More likely a gag gift in bad taste. Whatever its origin, it was long discarded, and the brittle lacquer crackled in his palm as he opened up the first doll.</p>
<p><em>Always anticlimactic, these things,</em> he remembered thinking. Never a surprise. Just a little wooden peanut smiling up at you in the end. He stacked the halves on the shelf in descending order as he opened them, like a cup game. Second to last doll; funny how the painter got sloppy, further in. This one’s little face only a hasty jumble of lines and red dots. He opened it and then frowned into his hands: never a surprise, but this time there was no ending doll. It had been taken, or was never there to begin with; there was no solid center.<br/>
<em>After all that, you were empty,</em> he chided it, crossly, and clapped it back together. A voice passing in the corridor: female, nasal, querying. Jim went back to work.</p>
<p>Now he is crouching in the cold night and the tiny ember is lighting, just faintly, a man’s profile. They’ve both been there a while. Long enough for the grass to creep a damp up his shins. He’s having trouble managing his breathing, even as he’s aware that the fog of it shows him. He allows himself time, crouching, breathing hard in the dark, knowing that letting the delay become intolerable will eventually help him forward.<br/>
There is only one thing to be done. The punchline, <em>who will do it,</em> he’s known the entire time. He’d understood what Control was actually requesting of him when he’d sent him after Stevcek’s single word. Control’s last wish. All Jim had been able to see, sitting in the cabin of the Paris flight, was the dim result of the equation; though then he’d had no inkling of what inhumane calculation it was built on. Control had surmised that he was the one who would, in the end, act. Control had also known he was the only one who could bear everything but the anger.<br/>
And now, as he’d feared, it was resolving the way it was designed.<br/>
He clears his throat, softly, and the ember turns in a slow revolve towards him. Then, in the near-perfect dark, Bill Haydon lifts a hand in welcome.</p>
<p>In the end it only takes a second. When it is over he smoothes Bill’s hair back in place where his grip had ruffled it; he can’t help himself.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter to him if he is heard on his circuit back to where the car is parked. He is not aware of anything mattering now. Still, his body has its habits, the long years of strict care, and he makes no sound. </p>
<p>His next months are a misery. Smiley never comes calling; that’s the single grace he’s given.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Part Two</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s a trick to injury: never stop moving. Slow down, even to a crawl if that’s all you can muster, but if you stop everything will knit and harden, muscles torn from the shoulder will drop around the ribs to clench; before you know it you're crippled, immobilized, can’t move even if you need to. It doesn’t hurt so much to run now and he does it most mornings. A slow shamble at first but now, thudding past the cricket field, he’s in his stride.</p>
<p>The cold is in his ears making his jaw ache but there’s heat running down his chest. He listens to the hollowness of his own breathing and calms it deliberately, slow in through the nose, slow out through the mouth. Above him a crow wavers in the air, drops down to the leafless branch of an alder to scream at him. He picks up his pace.</p>
<p>If you don’t keep moving the past will calcify you. He’s not dodging. There are things you can’t dodge. What he is doing, he tells himself, is replacing each bitter brick of the past with <em>now,</em> with the crow, with the soggy bramble and the crisp of frost, with the simple drum of his feet in the mud, with the wide gray sky, with the young voices carrying on the wind, with the ache in his shoulder, with the pain he can handle.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Part Three</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Grace is by nature a temporary phenomenon, but Jim Prideaux’s lasts over a year. It’s early spring when the coupe pulls up the drive to park, the driver’s door opens, and with a rocking motion like an old man leaving in a deep armchair, George Smiley emerges into the pale sunlight of the Dip.</p>
<p>It takes him a moment to get his overcoat sorted and longer to navigate the wet grass of the bank. By the time he’s managed it and stumped down into the shallow muddy garden beside the caravan, Prideaux’s had time to arrange his face, still bright red but now carefully neutral. He’s closed the caravan door behind him and stands, hands behind his back, a touch less crooked than before. Smiley picks his way over. Prideaux’s wide shadow falls over him, and his hand disappears into his fierce shake. In the morning chill Smiley’s glasses fog where they rest against his warm cheeks and the blur turns Prideaux into a reddish haze.<br/>
“Hullo, Jim.”<br/>
“Smiley. Who do I have to thank?” Jim’s rough voice, familiar, now hoarse with rage.<br/>
“Oh, I’m under my own steam,” Smiley answers, vaguely. “I was around, and thought I’d drop by. I haven’t any agenda.” All but the first words are a lie and Smiley waits blinking behind the smoke of his glasses as Jim digests it. He continues. “Have you time for a talk? Shouldn’t have dropped in, but I did quite want to see you.”<br/>
The eyes on his lift slowly, travel over his hat and up to make a long sweep over the ridgeline. Smiley raises a hand in protest. “No, nothing like that. It’s only myself, Jim, and only personal. Truly, now. I recall, last time we spoke, you said you’d drawn a line. I do believe you’ve accomplished that, haven’t you?” He ignores the sharp intake of breath, the sudden darkness in the eyes. Smiley lowers his voice. “I didn’t come here to cross it. Nor will anyone else.”<br/>
“No?” Jim is looking away, and there’s a hollow note in his question that Smiley can do nothing but pity.<br/>
“No.”<br/>
It was true. To the Circus the circumstances of Haydon’s death remained not only secret but censored, a source of disgrace all the way up. This visit to the Dip was simply a habit of Smiley’s, which he could not extinguish in himself, of seeing a thing through no matter how mangled he found it in the end. Also, perhaps, a concession to his sense of loyalty, which he’d never had much luck in brushing off.<br/>
And, most pressing, a matter of what his fastidiousness had wrought, the result of the gentle surveillance he’d kept over Prideaux. Two months ago, during his routine call-in, a journeyman carpenter had been brought to his attention. Welsh, of a height with Prideaux but half his weight, dark, with a quiet manner and no fixed address. Who had of late been coming round the caravan and managing to be rather careful about it. Smiley dug diligently but unearthed nothing. Those who should've known professed no information on any Welshman, no knowledge of anything, in fact, to the point where appearances indicated that Ellis was not only forgotten but actively ignored, and that in itself needled Smiley.<br/>
He’d already been blind enough. Who else was keeping tabs, and why? On the ride over it occurred to him that the man to ask, the most stringent observer, was Jim himself.<br/>
“At least, I hope so. Has anyone come round, Jim?”<br/>
“Besides yourself, and whoever you’re having read my mail for me,” he answers, <em>“no.”</em> The 'no' has an emphatic breath behind it that perks Smiley’s ears.<br/>
“That’s good to hear,” says Smiley, absently, as though it didn’t much matter. “You’re certain?”<br/>
Prideaux’s red face deepens. “Goddammit, George. Come in, then.” </p>
<p>He doesn’t need to duck, as Jim does, to enter the rounded aluminum doorway. The caravan is small inside, smells of cooking spice and coffee. Smiley reaches to accept a lukewarm cup, blows on it from habit, wedges himself into the wooden chair.<br/>
“I’m surprised to find you still here,” he says, meaning the caravan, and only after the words have left his mouth does he realize that he’s voiced, unwittingly, a lingering concern. He’d half expected to hear of a second death after Haydon’s. In the fierceness of the face that turns to him, he understands that with this expectation he’s done Prideaux a disservice.<br/>
“It suits me,” Jim replies shortly.<br/>
Smiley nods. Behind half-lowered lids he takes in the view. A year ago this caravan looked to him nothing more than a bunker, mobile and ready to flee, and he supposes he wasn’t far off. It’s changed. Surrounded by vegetable beds, sunk into the earth, a swept rug before the door for the mud; Smiley’s reminded of the campground hosts’ huts of his youth. And Prideaux himself looks better, less frozen, with the grim, scraped look somewhat rinsed away.<br/>
“The air out here’s doing you well, it seems,” he says. “It must suit you, or else something out here does.” He looks up in time to catch a momentary blankness glazing Prideaux’s eyes. Anyone might've missed it, but Smiley’s built a life on hitting nerves, and so he gives his neutral smile, drops the blankness into the vast files of his attention, and lets it alone to simmer.<br/>
He watches as Jim rises to light the stove, gives him time to collect himself. The man’s back is still wrenched into a twist but his movements aren't as abrupt; Smiley wonders how the pain is now. He frowns at the back of the sandy head.<br/>
“If you-” Smiley pauses, uncertain how to begin. “You got the bad end of it, Jim. If you want closure, or.. information, I may have some.”<br/>
Jim turns. A slow, rather wretched smile, not the blast of anger Smiley had expected.<br/>
“I thought you hadn’t any agenda.”<br/>
Smiley spreads his hands.<br/>
Jim sits heavily across from him and exhales, breath lifting the edges of the papers on the table. “No, I don’t need any more closure, George. Go on and say whatever you’ve come for.”</p>
<p><em>For your own peace. And mine, too, perhaps.</em> Smiley remembers, through the upstairs window, the humped blur moving quickly out on the sidewalk while the others dealt with Bill below, and how he’d guessed, miserably, what was coming. All the things he’d realized too late. It was fairly easy to allow a devotion, however unrequited, to devour you, as Smiley himself well knew. Bill had seen Jim clearly; saw his absolute, unfaltering love and exploited it for its utility. Then threw him to the wolves. Smiley wondered, not for the first time, how much of this Control had guessed at beforehand. <em>It was a fix from the start,</em> Bill had said. Did Jim know? The man was no fool. And then, Ann’s voice, whipped by the coast wind: <em>Think less of him</em> now, <em>George.</em> He’d mistaken her warning, of course. When does it become too late to let someone go? To change your mind? Is it even possible, really? <em>Throw him into the sea,</em> Ann had told him, but Smiley had the notion that even then Haydon’s dark shape would remain bobbing on the horizon. He wonders at the view now beneath the surface of Jim’s rough waters, and, discomfited, fidgets in his chair.<br/>
He looks up and Jim is staring at him. Smiley clears his throat.<br/>
“You had your strings pulled, and then they cut them loose and left you to the elements. Control fed you a line. You went ahead with the mission anyhow. And you <em>knew,</em> didn’t you?”<br/>
Silence.<br/>
“I think you did. It doesn’t matter. You were his cat’s-paw, Jim, and I’m sorry for that.”<br/>
“Control’s?”<br/>
“Bill’s, rather,” he corrects gently, looking away. “I believe I was Control’s.”<br/>
Jim says nothing.<br/>
“Well.” Smiley wraps both pudgy hands around his cup and inspects it, eyes down. “They’re both gone, and here we are.”<br/>
“All right, George,” Jim says softly, as if to quiet him, and they both stare through the rounded window out across the field. For a while they have a silence, and then Smiley sips his cold coffee, and brings them out of the past. </p>
<p>“Yes. My agenda.” The words are waiting in his mouth- someone’s been creeping round, Jim- and as he hesitates, calibrating, gauging what to disclose, his eyes wander and take in the sparse interior of the caravan. Spare and scrubbed, but not desolate. Books on the ledge, a copper pot with utensils. The stack of papers on the table between them with a chunk of agate pinning them down. Running shoes beside the door, toes turned up from being set at the stove to dry. Above the shoes Prideaux’s vast coat hanging on its peg with a frayed spot where he must need to pinch at the sleeve to pull it over his stiff arm.<br/>
And Smiley’s focus sharpens. Hanging beside the coat is a man’s blue chore-jacket, darned at the elbows, dusty, a size or two too small for Prideaux. Smiley looks away from it and hums in his throat. The solution falls over him. In his own hand the confirmation, a mug of coffee; two cups, two chairs, here in the home of a man who keeps close only what is absolutely necessary. He finds himself washed with a combined sense of relief and ruefulness. <em>Of course.</em> He can then name what has changed in the caravan: its stoic, solitary air is missing. He pulls air into the new, lighter place in his chest; he hadn’t realized he was so tense, or that he could be such an old fool. It might be, Smiley decides, all right far as Prideaux is concerned; as all right as enough time and luck can make it. He looks over at his friend and chooses his next words carefully. </p>
<p>“My agenda was to see about anything I could do for you, if you’ll name it.”<br/>
“Since you ask, yes.” He looks out the window, giving Smiley his wolfish profile. His blunt fingers tap on the small table; Smiley’s coffee shivers in its cup.<br/>
“You can forget about me.” His voice is calm, eyes on the field. Smiley nods. For some moments there is another, deeper silence between them. Then as Jim turns back, his face relaxes, and with a breath of his old smile he adds, “At least, for another few years.”</p>
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